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RIAA Abuses DMCA to Take Down Popular Tool for Downloading Online Videos
- mullikine 6y agoIn the words of Jackie Chiles, this is outrageous, egregious, preposterous
- musicale 6y agoIt's definitely strange; normal DMCA requests are to remove infringing content, but youtube-dl is code, not content.
- brokenmachine 6y agoI believe some of the tests download a very small amount of copyrighted content.
- shakna 6y agoExactly 10Kb of the video. Which would very likely fall under fair use.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThis still isn't relevant for a DMCA takedown request, youtube-dl was not hosting the content.
- brokenmachine 6y agoI believe DMCA also applies to circumvention tools. I don't personally agree that youtube-dl is a circumvention tool since all it does is emulate what your browser does anyway, but I presume that is the argument.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>believe DMCA also applies to circumvention tools. There is a separate section of the DMCA that deals with circumvention tools requiring a court order to take them down. DMCA takedown requests do not cover circumvention tools.
- kmeisthax 6y agoDMCA Section 1201 has a separate notice-and-takedown regime from DMCA Section 512 (the one most people think of when they hear "DMCA takedown").
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoCould you point to the portion of 1201 that has a notice-and-takedown regime at all, as opposed to the ordinary default of the plaintiff needing a court order (which the RIAA hadn't bothered to get)?
- dylan604 6y agoYou must have missed the whole DeCSS debacle. That was code that absolutely was meant to circumvent an encryption protection scheme regardless of how weak its encryption was. They went so far as to print the source code of DeCSS on t-shirts[0] as first amendment gestures after that code was deemed enemy number 1. [0] a 20 year old article: https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt/ https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...
- phendrenad2 6y agoThis is a gross misremembering of how DeCSS went down. They didn't just print "source code" on shirts, they very specifically printed the "magic number" that the MPAA was claiming was copyrighted CONTENT, not a circumvention device.
- dlgeek 6y agoYou're conflating DeCSS (which GP post was describing) and the AACS encryption key debacle which came later.
- dylan604 6y agoWho's grossly misremembering what? CSS was the encryption scheme attempting to protect DVDs. AACS was the encryption for Blu-ray. DeCSS could defeat CSS encryption because it was so weak. AACS was defeated because the master key that generated all other keys was discovered [0]. That's the magic number to which you are referring. Totally different subjects on somewhat similar topics. These 2 cases were separated by years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
- musicale 6y agoThe comparison with DeCSS doesn't make a lot of sense since youtube-dl was not decrypting anything. Regardless, since DMCA takedowns are for infringing content, isn't EFF's point valid, namely that there was no infringing content?
- zucker42 6y agoUnfortunately, companies have to respond to even grossly incorrect DMCA requests to avoid liability and there's no recourse against abusive requests.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Unfortunately, companies have to respond to even grossly incorrect DMCA requests to avoid liability No, they don't, because if they are grossly incorrect, there's no liability to avoid. They have to respond to even grossly incorrect though facially valid DMCA requests to avoid the costs of trying to evaluate whether DMCA requests that are facially invalid are sufficiently grossly incorrect as to present no real risk of liability. > there's no recourse against abusive requests. Sure there is, civil action for defamation
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"DMCA 1201 says that it's illegal to bypass a digital lock in order to access or modify a copyrighted work." No, 1201 says, among other things, that it is a violation of the Copyright Act (which may only carry civil liability, so not necessarily "illegal") to share the means to circumvent access controls to a copyrighted work. That is the part of 1201 the RIAA cited in its letter. It is the sharing that is the alleged 1201 violation. Not any circumvention.
- jimktrains2 6y agoI'm curious how this interacts wit the First Amendment, especially if the circumvention itself is legal.
- shmerl 6y agoIt is unconstitutional. EFF filed a court case to repeal it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/first-amendment-case-against-restrictive-copyright-law-can-proceed-says-judge https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/first-amendment-case-a...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago2 out of the 3 First Amendment claims (overbreadth, prior restraint) were dismissed. The one that survived was that 1201 might be unconsitutional as applied to the specific set of facts: a researcher publishing a book on encryption. The case is ongoing; there are no indications that EFF will succeed.
- shmerl 6y agoSomeone should succeed, may be legislators who shouldn't have allowed this to exist in the first place. Corrupt DMCA 1201 garbage should be eventually repealed.
- zucker42 6y agoI certainly believe it's unconstitutional but as an non-expert I think the courts feel skeptical of that argument (I believe they argue circumvention is conduct and not speech), and are perhaps less likely to review such cases because they feel it's unimportant. I'm hopeful about the EFF litigation though.
- ikeboy 6y agoThis is mildly misleading. RIAA's argument is mostly about the marketing for use with copyrighted content. The statute clearly doesn't say what EFF is saying RIAA thinks it says, and I don't see any indication that RIAA actually thinks or claims that interpretation.
- nullc 6y ago> about the marketing for use with You mean the fact that buried deep inside some test scripts were test targets to test specific URL encoding schemes that only exist on uploads by specific youtube partners (e.g. VEVO) by downloading and discarding less than 1 second of video? The youtube-dl documentation uses free videos uploaded by youtube-dl developers and by the Linux foundation. The claims that youtube-dl used RIAA member copyrighted works as examples in their docs are false.
- null0pointer 6y agoBesides the fact that DMCA was probably created specifically for the RIAA, is it possible for the EFF to push for the RIAA to be stripped of their right to use DMCA due to their abuse of it?
- rrobukef 6y agoOSS developers as a whole can fight back by lobbying projects to add license exceptions against certain corporations. Viewing riaa.com, let's start with jQuery, WordPress and bootstrap.
- mnw21cam 6y agoIt's sometimes very hard to change the license of an open source project. Technically you would need to contact all of the contributors to the project (and there may be a lot of them) and acquire their permission. In any case, RIAA already has a license to use the existing software. That license can't be unilaterally withdrawn, unless RIAA violates terms of the license that invalidates it. New versions of the software can be released with the new license, but RIAA can continue to use the older version with the original license. And, as other people have pointed out, this would create a software license that is "non-free", and therefore incompatible with other open-source licenses, causing all sorts of headaches with software distributions, and any other software that has a dependency on the software.
- jraph 6y agoAnd if everybody add their own little restrictions on people / organizations they find evil, the whole thing could rapidly become unmanageable even if licenses are somewhat compatible when trying to combine codes from different projects. This is not a good path to take, even if it sounds appealing. Revenge is also often not the right response to a bad action, it can escalate where the opposite effect may be desirable. Let's try other stuff and continue to allow RIAA to use our tools, they even may evolve for the better in the future and that would be great, no?
- 6y ago
- chii 6y agoi certainly hope the Streisand effect brings the general public the knowledge that this program exists and proliferate its existence. Whether the RIAA is acting correctly within the law or not is irrelevant to me. If they are indeed acting correctly within the existing laws, then i would call for civil disobedience against unjust and unfair law.
- seg_lol 6y agoThe program is useless w/o updates. Knowledge of it does nothing.
- vagrantJin 6y agoNo its not. For some sites maybe but not for all their supported sites.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoIt’s still being updated on their website, just not on GitHub: https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/
- buckminster 6y agoIt would be super nice if they published a copy of their latest git repository. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just a .gz file pushed to the website once a day (or week even) would be great.
- seg_lol 6y agopip download --no-binary ":all:" youtube-dl
- buckminster 6y agoThank you, but I wasn't very clear. What I'd like is a download including the .git directory, not just a snapshot of the latest code.
- panny 6y agoI'm surprised EFF bothered to say anything at all, now 13 days later. For those keeping score, Popcorn Time repo was only down for 15 days after RIAA's DMCA takedown.
- kristopolous 6y agoThey did a bunch of sites with similar tech shortly after. I can't help but think they are so out of the loop that they just found out the technology existed.
- dfxm12 6y agoOr maybe the court that the RIAA thinks will ultimately hear any related cases just had a conservative judge confirmed that they think will be sympathetic to them.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoAre conservative judges more likely to rule on the side of strengthening copyright? I didn't realize there was a liberal <-> conservative split on this.
- Claudus 6y agoI haven’t noticed a political association with copyright cases, I know some conservative Judges in Texas counties pretty much kicked copyright trolls out of the courtroom when they tried targeting defendants using IP addresses. Intellectual Property also seems like a more liberal realm, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Apple, etc. all seem to be quite left leaning.
- harpiaharpyja 6y agoThey aren't. Like others have pointed out, RBG was a copyright maximalist and all the proponents of strengthening copyright, RIAA, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, etc tend to be left-leaning. No idea where that line of thinking came from. Though if I were a little more cynical I'd say sometimes it feels like there's a trend to attribute everything negative to conservatives.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThat couldn't possibly shift anything; RBG was pretty much a copyright maximalist. The best ACB (who AFAIK has very little if any notable copyright record, either as a judge or otherwise) could be, from their perspective, is no change from the status quo ante.
- Darkphibre 6y agoThis was a fascinating writeup of one person's take on just how... strange a use for DMCA 1201 this was. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201023/19035045569/riaa-tosses-bogus-claim-github-to-get-video-downloading-software-removed.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201023/19035045569/riaa-...
- rStar 6y agomicrosoft had a rare chance here to actually stand up for developers in a way that would gain them a lot of mindshare, goodwill and respect. i wish they would’ve taken it.
- daptaq 6y agoBut then again, they are still Microsoft and deserve none of that.
- whereistimbo 6y agoThe GitHub CEO Nat Friedman (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=natfriedman https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=natfriedman) personally reached youtube-dl dev on IRC to offer an helping hand. https://twitter.com/t3rr4dice/status/1320660235363749888 https://twitter.com/t3rr4dice/status/1320660235363749888 (via TorrentFreak)
- feanaro 6y agoWhich is more of an indication that they realized this is costing them too much good will after the fact. He did still require code to be removed in order to reinstate the repository and the RIAA still managed to cause turmoil, so I would call this too little, too late.
- wegs 6y agoWhich was a completely duplicitous PR stunt. Nat: * Complied with a DMCA take-down request which he had no legal reason to comply with. DMCA takedown requests are for infringing content. DMCA bans anticircumvention measures, but that's between youtube-dl and RIAA. RIAA does that by initiating litigation, or sending a demand letter to the youtube-dl project. * Took down forks of youtube-dl, which he had no reason to do. Those should have been independent DMCA requests. * Threatened to ban users who forked youtube-dl, in violation of his own ToS and DMCA policy. If Nat was doing the bare minimum required to maintain legal compliance, I wouldn't fault him. Legally, he's zealously pursuing youtube-dl and acting as the RIAA's lapdog. At the same time, he's publicly making statements of empathy towards youtube-dl. Pathetic.
- vlovich123 6y agoI’m curious how the DMCA interacts with the 1st amendment. Have there been court cases examining this kind of DMCA application vs free speech rights?
- shakna 6y agoThere is one in progress from the EFF. [0] [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/first-amendment-case-against-restrictive-copyright-law-can-proceed-says-judge https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/first-amendment-case-a...
- dredmorbius 6y agoPoorly. EFF explainer video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ck7utXYcZng https://youtube.com/watch?v=ck7utXYcZng
- thesnide 6y agoI'm always wondering about the coincidence of calendar proximity of google music moving to youtube music and that takedown that explicitly mentions VEVO